PARKER: Taylor Swift, right on the button

This week, the world — and by the world, I obviously mean those of us who follow celebrity culture on Instagram — learned something shocking.

More shocking than people wondering who the heck Paul McCartney was after listening to Kanye West’s new single. More shocking than Justin Beiber’s Calvin Klein ads (are those even legal?). More shocking than Seattle coming back to beat Green Bay after an entire game of not even bothering to show up.

This week, ladies and gentlemen, we learned that Taylor Swift has a belly button.

It’s not that this should be breaking news or anything — although if you look at the BuzzFeed homepage and consider that a worthy source of breaking news, it totally is, but it’s definitely something worth noting. While Kim Kardashian can break the Internet with her amazing butt, Taylor Swift merely has to don a cute Victoria Secret two-piece on a vacay in Hawaii to make headlines.

The mystery behind Swift’s belly button has been broadcast across multiple media platforms for several years. Never have we ever witnessed her wear anything besides high-rise bottoms and barely-even-cropped tops. There are entire websites dedicated to following the journey of her non-belly button. What on earth could be wrong with it? Did she never lose her umbilical cord? Did she have a four-inch outie? There wouldn’t be anything wrong with this, of course, but it would explain the 1950s-esq beach cover-ups and the heavy Jackie Kennedy influence.

No, Swift just isn’t into the display of full belly nudity the way we all wish she was — and after seeing her abs, trust me, we all wish she was.

I remember the moment I discovered the good news. Not even waiting for Twitter to explode, I was trolling Insta and drooling over her just-posted picture of the Hawaiian blue sea when it appeared. Three seconds old, I had already double-tapped the picture. I screen shot it, because I knew I was going to have to zoom in to make sure the tall blonde with the chic hair cut and the belly button was, in fact, Taylor Swift.

It was.

“HOLY!” I screamed, as my boyfriend spilled coffee all over the bed in response to my enthusiasm. “Taylor Swift has a belly button!”

As you might imagine, this news to me was more of an ordeal than it was to him. His quizzical look prefaced his verbal response: “Is that... a thing?”

“Oh, it is,” I said, “Perez Hilton is going to be all over this.”

He was — every one was. It was as if Taylor Swift reminded us that we can’t judge an album by its cover (unless it’s 1989 because that Polaroid very clearly depicts the themes of youthful recklessness).

When we spend so much time focusing on what we aren’t seeing in someone else — the dirty dishes, the unevenly ripped toilet paper squares, the clogged shower drain, the dust bunnies under the bed — we forget that these missing pieces are, by definition, still normal. Taylor Swift has a belly button, and it looks like mine — with abs attached. Justin Beiber hurts after leg day. Kate Moss has probably accidentally sat on — not squatted over — a public toilet. Beyoncé probably gets ingrown bikini hairs. Kimmy K really does have an awesome derrière — whether you’ve watched the video or not.

The button line is, we use Facebook enough to know that what we see is not — at all — what we actually get. Alas, we only get what people choose to give, and Taylor Swift finally gave us what we were looking for. De-linted, of course.

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